Welcome to The Mystical Underground

WE HOPE YOU JOIN US TONIGHT ON DARK MATTER RADIO WITH MARK JOHNSON, from 9-10 PM EDT. WE’LL BE TALKING (LIVE) ABOUT OUR FAVORITE TOPIC- SYNCHRONICITY!

AND HERE’S A LINK FOR THE LIVE CHAT ROOM DURING THE SHOW.

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Imagine it. You’re George Colby, a guy in upstate New York in the late 1800s, and your spirit guide – Seneca – directs you to establish a Spiritualist camp in the wilds of Florida. So what do you do? Well, you head out for Florida, of course.

Back then, Florida was a swamp, a mosquito haven, a place of sweltering heat and wilderness so extreme that unless you had some landmarks, you would count yourself among the lost and the missing. But Seneca had given Colby some landmarks – seven hills, a lake…  And in 1875, Colby arrived and five years later, he filed for a homestead of nearly 75 acres.

Today, Cassadaga is divided into two distinct areas and the dividing line is Cassadaga Road. Everything south of the road is the Spiritualist camp. For more than a century, the “real” mediums lived in the camp. They were supposedly tested by the association for their mediumship skills, their ability to communicate with the dead. Psychics and mediums who practiced on the other side of the road were supposedly phonies, just living there for the spillover gravy train. This attitude and the border persist to the present.

On the porch of the Cassadaga Hotel, the main landmark at the border of the camp, you can see the buildings on the other side of the road where the non-camp psychics live and work. It’s like standing at the border between two countries. The people in these two countries speak the same language, share the same customs and belief systems, but this phony border separates them.

I’ve been visiting  Cassadaga since 1975. In all these years, all these readings, I have found three mediums who were the real McCoy – Wilbur Hull, a paraplegic who first read for me in 1975; Don Fleck, who read for Rob and me in the mid-1980s; and Hazel West Burley.  The rest of my readings in this strange town have been with psychics who live on the other side of Cassadaga Road and they were every bit as good at the three mediums who lived within the camp.  

This border has persisted for more than a century, but a subtle shift may be underway. Here’s why.

Within the camp, there are several natural lakes – Colby Lake and Spirit Pond. In the past when we have visited, the lakes were a dominant presence in the community, filled with water, a gorgeous sparkling blue that attracted all sorts of wildlife – frogs, wading birds, eagles, rodents that lived in the lushness that surrounded the lake.  If water represents spirit, then Spirit Pond was its paragon. It seemed to whisper, I represent the veil between worlds, and here in Cassadaga, that veil is quite thin…  At the shore of Spirit Pond, there’s a pagoda where you can sit and take in the beauty of the lake and the surrounding area. 

The problem is that Spirit Pond and Colby Lake are little more than mud holes now. The docks of private homes on the lakes are now high and dry, the frogs that used to croak in the evening have mostly vanished. Yes, part of the problem is a lack of rain. But there’s something else at work here. If you look at this symbolically, it’s as if the spirit of Cassadaga  as it has been defined for more than a century – a Spiritualist community where the living commune with the dead – is changing, shifting.

Several weekends ago, we stayed at a B&B in nearby Lake Helen,  but spent most of our day exploring Cassadaga. We walked way out into what used to be Spirit Pond, and I was struck by the symbolism, that Cassadaga, like the rest of the world, is in the midst of a paradigm shift.Here’s a photo of the dry lake.

I was thinking about this as I sat on the porch of our B&B Saturday evening and heard and then spotted an eagle moving between the trees.   

Esoterically, eagles are about seeing the larger picture. What is that larger picture for the Spiritualist community of Cassadaga? What if  this silly border – didn’t exist? After all, the veil between the living and the dead can be penetrated from either side of the road.  

It will be interesting to see what happens in Cassadaga in the years ahead.

Our friend and fellow writer, Nancy Pickard, sent us the following synchro about the fate of an abandoned baby goose.

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Last night, I spent a couple of hours reading a wonderful book,  Providence of a Sparrow by Chris Chester, about a couple who rescued a bird. Shortly after I put the book down, my son, Nick, called to say, “Mom! Alex and I just rescued a bird!” Alex is his fiancée, and they’re getting married on June 21. The photo at the top of the post is Alex with Zazu, the little goose they rescued.

They were driving along the street in front of their apartment complex when a baby Canada goose ran under the car! Nick braked, scared he had run over it. They stopped right in the middle of traffic and got out to look. No bird under the tires. They looked around, and there was the baby, who had run to a curb and was trying to get over it, but it was too high.

Nick and Alex picked it up, and then parked and went looking for its family. They did find a goose family, but the geese wanted nothing to do with them. And when they tried walking away, to see if baby would go after the geese, of course he ran right after Nick and Alex.

So they took him to their apartment.

I went over to visit last night and this morning. Oh, he was so cute. He loved to cuddle, and his favorite thing was to lie pressed up close to your neck, snuggle his head under your collar, and sleep on your shoulder while you held his feet up with one hand. But he wouldn’t eat or drink.

Eventually, by comparing photos, Alex figured out he must be only a day or two old, which made not eating okay because he was still full from yolk. She theorized he’d been a late-hatcher and had gotten left behind. They named him Zazu.

This afternoon, they took him to a wildlife rehab center, where they confirmed he was, indeed, only a couple of days old. They put him under a heat lamp immediately, and his mom and dad left, feeling sad, but happy he would now be fine.

It’s been a sweet little episode, but so weird that I was reading about the couple rescuing a bird, only to receive a call about “my” couple rescuing a bird.

I was just now watching short vids of the bird and man who star in the bird book I am reading. I took a break to play Words With Friends and started a new game. The only word I could spell from the letters? AVIAN!

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Geese mate for life, so I take this as a great sign for Nick and Alex!

 The other night, we were guests on Daniel Ott’s interesting live podcast.  In the fifty plus radio shows we’ve done for our last two synchronicity books, his audience asked some of the most provocative questions.  I jotted down some of them and glanced over my notes later on.

Is déjà vu related to synchronicity?

Are fractals in nature connected to synchronicity?

Can sex trigger a synchronicity?

Is luck a form of  synchronicity?

Is synchronicity connected to fate or destiny?

When you have a synchronicity, does it mean you’re on the right path?

Is synchronicity the devil’s work?

Is synchronicity a sign from God?

Is synchronicity mentioned in the Bible?

Are all synchronicities good?

Can aliens control or generate synchronicity?

I realized that I although I have a loose checklist about what I believe about synchronicity, I need to write it out and have it handy for these shows. So here’s my checklist. It’s certainly not definitive. Feel free to add to it!

– Synchronicity may be the voice of the higher self- or of God, Buddha, whatever your spiritual beliefs.

– If we are multidimensional beings, then déjà vu could be one form of synchronicity.

– I don’t know if synchronicity is mentioned in the Bible, but signs are. And synchronicity is all about signs.

– No, all synchros aren’t good. Some are warnings to follow – or not – a particular path. Some are dark tricksters, which are often seen in mass media events. This type of synchro seems to be designed to shake us awake, to make us more aware.

– Synchronicity is at work in spirit communication. Some of the best examples are found in the white feather stories on Mike Perry’s blog.

– As for the devil and synchronicity…well, I think that depends on your belief system. If you believe in a devil, then the darker synchros may be interpreted in that light.

– Just because you have a synchronicity, it doesn’t mean you should follow that guidance. Sometimes, synchros seem to present options.

–       Luck versus synchronicity. We addressed this issue in 7 Secrets of Synchronicity  and did a post about it.  In essence, luck is a fortunate synchronicity unless the adjective ‘bad’ comes before it. Luck is something that appears unplanned, outside of cause and effect, hence, synchronicity. But here’s the difference. Imagine jotting down six numbers and they turn out to be the ones that win the powerball lottery the next day. That’s synchronicity. But if you bought the ticket and used the numbers, that’s luck. It took action before the synchronicity turned into something incredibly lucky.

–       Synchronicity & fate/destiny. This is a sticky question because I believe that we are beings endowed with complete free will. I believe that we – our souls, our higher selves, whatever you want to call it – choose everything from our parents and the circumstances of our births to the experiences we have as physical beings. I believe that we create our reality from the inside out. And yet, astrology, through a point called a Vertex, suggests that we before we’re born, we make certain agreements to meet up with someone, to have a particular experience.  But our free will ultimately decides whether we keep this appointment or not.

– Synchronicities happen more frequently when we’re aware of them and that often begins when our lives are in the grips of major transitions – falling in love, marriage, divorce, birth, death, a professional leap, a move, a change in financial status- i.e., BIG changes.

-Sex or any intense emotional/physical experience can trigger synchronicity.

– Can aliens or inter-dimensional beings control and generate synchros? According to contactee Sandy,  the answer is a resounding yes.

– Synchronicity is an interface between the living and the dead; between the face we represent to the world and who we are in the deeper recesses of our souls; between us and the  underlying reality that permeates our lives; between the conscious and the unconscious.

Synchronicity is the most obvious manifestation of the ways we are connected, one to another, you to me, to you, to you and you, on up the line to more than 7 billion souls. Synchronicity reminds us we are all in this together.

In The Synchronicity Highway, Chapter 1, The Synchro Travelers, begins this way:

When you venture forth on a journey, a trek that takes you out of your normal routines and concerns, your consciousness has greater freedom to explore. Your comfort ones are gone, your kitchen, your bed and your pillows are memories. You’re in new, unfamiliar territory and must confront who you are.

That condition is especially true during lengthy trips, when travel turns into journey. Not being anchored in your usual world can stimulate stress, but also synchronicity. Here’s a story that perfectly fits what we were talking about in the that chapter. It’s from Steve Finegan, who has a blog called ‘Achieving Wow!’

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“When I was 19, I spent the summer trekking through Europe with my girlfriend. It was great, for a while. But throw two kids together for a few months, traveling on filthy buses and trains, frequently sleeping out in the open, often in the rain, and never-ever getting enough to eat, and you build up a certain amount of tension. Anyway, this tension mounted, until one day, riding a bus through Munich, we just stopped speaking to each other.

“Eventually, we got off and started walking. Twenty minutes and many twists and turns later, I heard my girlfriend groan. I turned. She was sitting on the curb, her head between her knees, sobbing. She’d left her little blue travel case on the bus and had been too tired to miss it. That was it. The last straw. We had it out right there and wound up breaking up.

“Determined at least to make an attempt to find her case before going our separate ways, we found a police station and went in, planning to report it lost, even though we knew the odds of getting it back were zero. But inside the station, we found a woman beside herself with excitement. She waved us outside. A bus had pulled up. We made a dash for it. The doors hissed opened, and there was my girlfriend’s case, sitting beside the driver.

“He smiled and pointed at it. “You lucky, ja!” In the rush of relief, the tension broke, and my girlfriend and I made up on the spot. Our relationship wasn’t to last, but we finished our travels through Europe together without having another argument. The experience had changed us.”

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 Just reading Steve’s story reminded me of past journeys to foreign lands where new and unexpected experiences – some good, some not-so-good – occurred on a daily basis. A big part of those trips were the friendships made, short-lived, but intense – one following another. And as a lone traveler, spells of loneliness. Some of those stories are included in that chapter of the book.

THIS EVENING, FROM 8:15 TO 10:00 EDT TIME, WE’LL BE TALKING WITH DANIEL OTT ABOUT THE SYNCHRONICITY HIGHWAY. HOPE YOU’LL JOIN US!

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For Rob’s birthday, we headed north to Orlando for the weekend to celebrate with our daughter. The plan was that we would spend Friday night at Megan’s place, then drive over to Cassadaga on Saturday and back to Orlando on Sunday for one of Megan’s Paint Nites.

The highlight for Saturday was lunch with Sandy, a contactee,  and her husband, George. We’ve written about Sandy before and have been doing synchronized meditations with her once a week or so, a kind of experiment in high strangeness.  She’s a retired veterinarian whose specialty was animal neuroscience. Her encounters have never involved the classical abduction scenario, medical experimentation, or being taken into a craft.

Some of her experiences of these beings – whom she refers to as energies – sound utterly terrifying to me, but over the years she has learned to control her fear and now works consciously with these entities.  She has names for them – Watcher, Marshal, John –  which makes it easier for her to distinguish them in her journals.

George called around 11 a.m. Saturday to let us know he and Sandy had arrived in Cassadaga.  I explained we were getting off to a late start but would arrive 30 or 40 minutes later. I called them after we’d checked into the B&B where we were staying. George said that Sandy was having a reading and explained where he was waiting.  It turned out that Sandy was having a reading with psychometrist Kathy Adams, who we have also written about before. It wasn’t a synchro; we had told her we were going to get readings from Kathy. That said…

It was a Saturday, one of the busiest days in Cassadaga. In the past, we’ve had to wait for readings with Kathy because she had so many clients. But this Saturday was different. Rob went in while Sandy was still getting a reading, and sat in the waiting room. George and I waited  in the garden with Nika and Noah. Megan and her friend, Sommer, arrived and joined us in the garden. It turned out that 5 of us, one after another, got in to see Kathy for readings.

This was so unusual that I kept wondering what was going on. Even though other people arrived and could have entered Kathy’s waiting room at any time, they didn’t. For whatever reason, they walked on. I knew that Sandy and George had a limited amount of time to spend in Cassadaga and, on any other Saturday, we might have spent all that time waiting for our turn with Kathy. It was as if an energy shift had occurred and that shift deflected interruptions of what was apparently some sort of flow the six of us had hooked into. I took it as a positive sign.

After our readings, we headed over to the Cassadaga Hotel for lunch, and ate out on the porch.

The conversation, naturally, quickly turned to contact and synchronicity.  Here’s a cluster of hummingbird synchros Sandy experienced that proved to be quite powerful – and healing.

In August of 2013, she was worried that her dog, Nellie, might be ailing. She was twelve and a half, wasn’t eating well, just wasn’t herself. One night, Sandy had a magnificent dream about two hummingbirds hovering around her mailbox, facing each other. They were larger than normal hummingbirds and she sensed they were mates. In the dream, their wings came together to form a heart shape.

A couple of days after she’d had the dream, she and George were sitting in their yard and a hummingbird appeared, larger than most hummingbirds, just as in her dream. “Hummingbirds are winter residents in Florida and it was mid-August; I have no idea what a hummingbird was doing here at this time of year,” she says. “To me, the hummingbird represents angelic energy, joy.”

A few days later, she was downloading songs that a friend had sent her years ago – 200 songs, odds and ends. She figured she should get them into the music file on her computer. While the songs were downloading, she noticed a hummingbird out in the garden and went over to the window to get a closer look. But it had flown away. She turned back to her computer and saw that the download had stalled. The song that refused to download? Seals & Croft’s Hummingbird. 

She snapped a screenshot of the song refusing to download:

The next day, Sandy passed a road she’d never seen before and glanced at the sign: Hummingbird Lane.

It was now abundantly clear to her that she was in the grips of synchronicity and she felt it was related to Nellie’s  deterioration. Sandy checked her over – and found a large mass in her abdomen. She took the dog to her vet, and sure enough, he identified it as well. He didn’t think Nellie was a candidate for surgery and not long afterward, Sandy and George had to have her put down.

Sandy understood that the cluster of hummingbird synchros had been alerting her to Nellie’s condition. Hummingbirds not only symbolize joy, but in some indigenous traditions are considered to be messengers from the spirit world. “The synchro softened the blow of her passing, and helped to heal our broken hearts.”

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Rob will be posting about a conversation he had with George, about a UFO sighting – and possibly an abduction – that he experienced. There was lot going on at this seemingly casual lunch!

The other day I went to Facebook and read a semi-crazed rant by someone who was complaining vehemently about how stupid it was  to click ‘like’ every time you read a post. “Are you brain-dead? What was the point?” He mentioned that some people even do so on posts about a death in the family or a personal tragedy of some sort.  I guess he has a point there. Bad taste. I was actually tempted to click ‘like,’ but for obvious reasons thought better of it. Instead, I scrolled on.

Then I came to this strange post by a guy named Mark Johnson:

“Are you filthy rich? Do you have so much money you don’t know how to spend it? Do you have a fascination with the paranormal? Before you spend it on another Bentley or buy that island in the South China Sea, we have a better suggestion.

“Why not give a huge chunk of change to us? We are looking for a benefactor/sugar daddy/sugar momma to toss a ridiculous amount of unneeded cash our way to fund our pet paranormal project. We want to take 3-4 months off work, buy a motor home, and travel across the United States investigating some of the most haunted paranormal locations for a new documentary series.

“We will be communing with ghosts and chasing demons till they drop! There will be no return on your investment, which means you can use us as a tax write off and at least get a producer credit. So if you have a few hundred thousand to a few million burning a hole in your pocket, give us call! Your investment will be well spent! My mommy always said if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so we’re asking!”

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Was he serious or was it a joke? Maybe both. I don’t know Mark Johnson well. I only met him once when Trish and I appeared on his radio/podcast show called, Unknown Origins. I noticed no one had responded, and kind of felt sorry for him. So I clicked ‘like’ and moved on.

Within the hour, I received a message from Mark.

“Hi Rob.  Thanks for liking my joke post.  It’s ironic as I just listened to your interview with Whitley Strieber on Dreamland about your book on Synchronicities, and I was wondering if you and Trish would like to come back on our radio show.  We are now on Art Bell’s Dark Matter Radio Network on Monday nights from 9-10 PM, and I’m currently booking guests for June.  Let me know if you’re interested and we’ll pick a date.  It’s a subject I’m interested in.”

I wrote him back and told him that he’d had a synchronicity – the subject we would be talking about on his show. So clicking ‘like’ really ain’t that bad. Sometimes good things can come out of it, even synchros!

I’ve mentioned before how synchronicities sometimes just pass us by as if what just happened wasn’t unusual. I had a chance to observe one of these instances a a few weeks back when a meaningful coincidence occurred during a somewhat tense moment  while I was off-road biking with my friend Don.

First, I should say that Don is a retired fire chief, a man whose work was extremely stressful at times, and boring and tedious at other times. He lives here in Wellington and commuted 60 miles to Miami. Lots of firemen live far from their fire stations, preferring rural or semi-rural lifestyles when not on the job. Since they work long shifts, they only make the commute a couple of times a week.

I should add that synchronicities aren’t something that Don normally tunes into. In fact, he can’t recall ever having one. Yet, I witnessed one occur, an event that defied the odds, and he didn’t seem to recognize it. At the time, his focus was elsewhere and what happened, paraphrasing his words, was ‘just one of those things that worked out.’ Yes, but look how it worked out.

Here’s the story. We’d completed our five-mile trail ride without incident…or so we thought. Back in the parking lot, we congratulated ourselves for not taking any tumbles on the ‘technical trail,’ which means there are log piles, nasty roots, steep inclines and drops to contend with, besides an occasional sandtrap.

Then Don realized his cell phone was missing. He’d carried it in a pouch, but had forgotten to zip it closed. So we headed back to the trail, wondering about our chances of finding it. The phone could be anywhere along the trail, maybe invisible in the underbrush.

As we rode along the road that led to the trail entrance, Don suggested that once we were actually on the trail, I should call his phone and hopefully we would hear it. A good idea, I thought, except for one thing.

When Don noticed that I was hesitating, he added: “I hope your battery is good.”

“It’s not the battery that’s the problem, I forgot my phone at home,” I told him, and suddenly it seemed that chances of finding his phone were dimming.

That’s when we noticed a man walking along the sidewalk and wondered if he might be willing to keep calling Don’s number for the next half hour as we circumnavigated the trail. Of course, maybe that guy didn’t have a cell phone with him, either, or his battery was low. Or maybe he had something better to do.

Before I had a chance to suggest the idea, Don rode ahead and stopped the man. As I arrived, they were talking like old friends. Indeed they were. The other man was also a retired firefighter and they used to work together. The friend had no problem calling Don’s number over and over. In fact, the number was already listed among his contacts.

What were the chances of that? I thought. But, like I said, Don seemed unfazed by the idea that another former Miami firefighter, a friend, just happened to be walking along the sidewalk in a fairly out-of-the-way area. We never did find out what he was doing there, but he kept calling Don’s number and within ten minutes of backtracking along the trail, we found the phone. Fortunately, no other riders had come along and ridden over it.

Don was lucky, and he’d experienced a synchro, even though he didn’t know it.

David Wilson, the publisher of Crossroad Press, who published our last two books on synchronicity, has sent us some intriguing synchros in the past. This one is stunning and concerns an event that happened nearly 30 years ago.  I think it falls into the category of what goes around comes around, or something to that effect.  And it’s another great example of Indra’s net, that web that connects us all.

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My ex-agent introduced me to a guy a while back who has a couple of books we decided to publish. He’s a bit odd, but we’ve been working with him. The cover of his book has been a problem. But he wrote me tonight and said he had a friend who had lived in Rota, Spain for a number of years, teaching English to sailors and that he had photos we can use for the cover.

Rota, Spain isn’t exactly on the tourist track. It’s a Spanish naval base commanded by a Spanish admiral and funded by the U.S. government. 

I was stationed there between 1982-1985 and since I took English in Rota, I asked the author his friend’s name. Sure enough, the author’s friend, his brother-in-law, is the teacher from whom I took an English course. I remember he gave me a great grade because I wrote an essay espousing my theory that the reason people dislike the classics is because of the way they are taught by English teachers. I remembered that grade – and, thus, his name.

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What are the odds on that one?

One day a professional artist came to Paint Nite, and painted the painters. That’s Megan teaching in the background.

Sometimes I don’t immediately recognize a synchronicity, but days, weeks, or even months later, I suddenly realize what an amazing synchro had occurred. And I also wonder how I could’ve missed it.

That was the case recently when I was talking with Trish about how well daughter Megan is doing this year in both her jobs, including her dog walking biz and her work as a Paint Nite artist/teacher. With dog walking, she has managed to expand her downtown venue and now works with a partner. With Paint Nite, she’s progressed from one class a week to three or four, and her boss who owns the Orlando, Florida franchise considers Megan her top artist. She’s now involved in selecting paintings and training new artists.

The synchro, or actually synchros, that I overlooked occurred the day she was interviewed and hired for Paint Nite.  That day everything came together for her, and that was after weeks of frustration getting turned down for part-time jobs she was well qualified for, but probably would’ve hated.

When her future boss, Carolyn, asked Megan about her experience as an artist, she mentioned her degree in fine arts from Florida’s top public liberal arts honors college, then added that she currently had a gallery show in Orlando. The show, she explained, was in a bar called BART, which stood for Bar & Art.

Probably mentioning an art gallery show in a bar wouldn’t be that impressive, except for the fact that the job she was applying for involved teaching art in bars! People learn to paint and they’re served drinks.

So that was a synchro, but there was more. The day of the interview her art show was feature on a local TV news show. So she told Carolyn that if she couldn’t stop by BART to see the show, she could see her interviewed that evening on the news.

No wonder she got the job. The stars were surely aligned that day and the synchros were flowing. She was definitely on the fast-track of the synchronicity highway.

While at the time I recognized the synchro with the TV interview, I’d overlooked the oddity that both her gallery show and her potential new job as an art teacher took place in bars. But in downtown Orlando, it all makes sense. There are lots of bars and lots of bar-hopping young people living downtown. And it seems quite a few of them are looking for an artistic outlet as well as a couple of drinks.

As I was writing this, Megan called and told us that she’d just taught a class at a new bar downtown with 50 patrons painting, about double the size of her usual classes. And when you teach painting in a bar, you also get tips that some evenings doubles her income.

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